This article refers to the political philosopher; for other people with this name, see John Gray.

John Gray (born 1948) is the Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and one of Britain's most prominent political philosophers.

He was Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 1998, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford from 1976 to 1998. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian , New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement, and is the author of several influential books on political theory, including Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), in which he argues that humanity, nothing more than a genetic accident, is a rapacious species that is wiping out other forms of life while destroying its own environment.

Works and thought

A former supporter of the New Right in the 1980s, and then of New Labour in the early 1990s, Gray now believes that the conventional (left-wing/right-wing) political solutions of conservatism and social democracy are no longer viable.

Gray is perhaps most notable for his groundbreaking work, since the 1990s, on the uneasy relationship between the value-pluralism and liberalism of Isaiah Berlin, [1] which has ignited considerable controversy, and for his strong criticism of neoliberalism and the global free market. More recently, he has been highly critical of some of the central currents in Western thinking, such as humanism, and has tended towards Green thought, drawing from the Gaia theory of James Lovelock, among others.

Quote

-“To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.” — John Gray in Two Faces of Liberalism

Bibliography

• Mill on Liberty: A Defense (1983)
• Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (ed. with Zbigniew Pelezynski) (1984)
• Hayek on Liberty (1984)
• Liberalism (1986)
• Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (1989)
• J.S Mill On Liberty in Focus (ed. with G.W. Smith) (1991)
• Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (1993)
• Postliberalism: Studies in Political Thought (1993)
• Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (1995)
• Isaiah Berlin (1995)
• Liberalism (2nd ed.) (1995)
• After Social Democracy: Politics, Capitalism and the Common Life (1996)
• Mill on Liberty: A Defense (2nd ed.) (1996)
• Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (1997)
• Hayek on Liberty (3rd ed.) (1998)
• False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998)
• Two Faces of Liberalism (2000)
• Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
• Al Queda and What it Means to be Modern (2003)
• The Mirage of Globalisation (2003)
• Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004)

External links

• 'Gray on Gray' (American Political Science Association)